As coronavirus drives most of us into our homes to stem the rate of infection, a select group of scientists is working on ways to keep this from happening again. Some of the scientists are in our backyard, the epicenter of the U.S. crisis, including Dr. Deborah Fuller, a vaccinologist and professor of microbiology at the University of Washington. She leads one of the labs in pursuit of a moonshot: a vaccine against coronavirus that can be produced and distributed rapidly and safely enough to help populations worldwide turn the tide of COVID-19’s spread and deaths.
Fuller has been working on vaccines since 1991, specializing in novel DNA and RNA vaccines to spur the antibodies that fight viruses in humans. She and her team believe that this type of vaccine is our best chance at developing a safe vaccine years more quickly than usual, but no DNA or RNA vaccine has ever gotten far enough in human trials to be approved for broad use. As their expertise rockets to the forefront of scientific need, more scientists are testing the DNA/RNA approach. Moderna, the Boston-based company that this week started the first phase one clinical human trial of coronavirus vaccines in Seattle, employed an RNA vaccine.
Here Fuller shares more about this vaccine, how the development process is going and how it feels to be a scientist living at the U.S. epicenter of a historic outbreak.
